With the advent of the Internet, search engines were created to assist users in locating information from among the millions of documents, mostly web pages, created and available through the use of the Internet. Similar search engines have also been created to search document repositories available internally to an organization. But unlike most documents available over the Internet, many of these internal organization's documents are not in a mark-up language format, such as HTML, XHTML, YAML, CFML, XML, etc.
Search engines generally use metadata, or data about the document, to improve the search results of a particular query. Metadata can be supplied by the author of the document or by a software program that creates the document. Mark-up languages provide an author of a document a simple way to supply metadata to a search engine, usually in the form of a META tag in the primary content of the document. Because the vast majority of the documents available over the Internet are written in a mark-up language format, search engines have been developed to identify and use the information contained in a META tag in creating search indexes and responding to queries.
But the META tag is not available for documents that do not use a markup language, such as HTML. Thus, the META tag is not available for many of the documents created and stored internally by organizations. While the contents of these documents may be available to a search engine, metadata about these documents is not generally available, resulting in poorer quality search results.